I’ve already recently posted on this subject, but this story has a bit more detail than my short comment. Here’s an excerpt:

SUNSPOTS come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only for them to fade away again after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. “This is solar behaviour we haven’t seen in living memory,” says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

What stories like this gloss over is the fact that Global Warming advocates have for the past few years been saying that the sun’s diminished activity is a short-term phenomenon and that the sun is about to come roaring back with a vengeance, greatly increasing the danger of Global Warming. I’ve seen stories for the past year warning about how the recent solar minimum has lulled foolish denialists into a false sense of security that is about to be shattered by the sun’s sudden outburst of record levels of heat.

But the sun isn’t doing that, and the earth continues to cool at a rate that is even larger than the warming that the Goreites have warned about. The potential for a new “little ice age” is something these fools better start looking at. Unlike “Global Warming,” if we actually experience “Global Cooling” that would be a serious problem for the human race. Cold has always been vastly more detrimental to human civilization than heat. Yesterday it snowed in south Africa for the first time in 20 years, and it’s not even officially winter yet.

Which points out another convenient lie that the Warmists spout, that the decade long cooling trend is restricted to North America, but the rest of the world is heating. This lie gets repeated ad nauseum by Warming advocates even though the Antarctic ice sheet has been growing steadily for the last decade.

I’m not rooting for a new ice age, but I do wish the “consensus scientists” who have their heads up their colons would take it out long enough to look at the actual facts.

8 users commented in " What’s wrong with the sun? "

A new Ice Age would almost be worth it if it will get these ninnies to shut it.

I dare not watch a nature show any more for fear of being bludgeoned over the head about global warming. The worst are the shows about the Arctic. They will invariably have shot of a polar bear swimming while the narrator solomnly intones that polar bears are going extinct because of global warming. It makes me want to throw a brick through the television every time.

Cosmic, I firmly believe (and have for a long time) that we are headed to an ice age.

My frustration level is like staylor’s. You can not get away from that droning lie ANYWHERE!

Bob Hawkins said,

in June 17th, 2010 at 2:07 pm

We may get a new Ice Age, but the ninnies won’t shut it. They’ve already switched from predicting a new Ice Age, in the mid-1970s, to predicting Global Warming, without even reducing the volume. In some amusing cases like Stephen Schneider, it’s the exact same people. (Schneider co-authored a paper that debunked the idea that CO2 could cause enough warming to prevent global cooling. But he was one of the first to jump on the CO2-warming bandwagon.)

The only thing that will slow them down is that the Global Cooling script is typewritten, and not machine-readable. If they had any shame, they wouldn’t be who they are.

staylor said,

in June 17th, 2010 at 2:25 pm

What irritates me most about the polar bear thing is that the majority of polar bear populations on the North American continent have increased in the past decade. The only they are on the endangered species list is beacuse an act of congress made it so in spite of the evidence. Their rational was that polar bears should be going extinct because of global warming so they needed to be listed; and of course the fact that the bears were listed is now used as proof that global warming is happening.

Foobarista said,

in June 17th, 2010 at 9:03 pm

A couple of things that were interesting about that article:

1. It is the first time that solar output has been shown empirically to vary. For some reason, solar output was supposed to be an absolute constant like the speed of light or the gravitational constant. Not sure why anyone thought this since solar output was known to be quite a bit lower a couple billion years ago – meaning it *can* vary – but this seemed to be an article of faith.

2. Solar output aside, the best working theory as to why the lack of sunspots correlates with cooling is somewhat roundabout, but appears to simulate relatively well: less sunspots means weaker solar mag field, means more cosmic rays hitting the earth and not being deflected by solar mag field, which means more cloud cover, which means more cooling due to albedo and such. It is thought that this is a stronger effect than direct solar “power” output.

I’ve seen that theory Foo, and I suspect that there is something to it, but it strikes me as too complex and too hard to demonstrate empirically. I am one of those who think that less solar energy directly translates into a cooler earth. I like simple theories.

Why is there less solar output when there are fewer sunspots? I suspect it’s simply because sunspots are indications of increased internal energy generation, which ends up working its way to the surface as more heat output.

mtnlurker said,

in June 18th, 2010 at 8:02 am

But I keep seeing warnings about solar flares and CMEs that could disrupt our technology centric society. Aren’t CMEs related to sunspot activity? I’ve read that the sunspots are actually where magnetic lines of force that erupt from the surface are connect to the main body of the sun. Some of the videos are pretty cool.

mtn: I’m not sure it’s fair to call it “hype.” However, I believe that there is a lot of exaggeration and a lot of agenda-driven “reporting” going on in the science “media.”

The threat of a major solar flare or major solar magnetic storm (they are not the same thing, but they can be related) to the earth is very real. It always has been real. The current electrical grid infrastructure does have some significant weaknesses, but the overall grid is more robust than many “experts” would have you believe. I read a very thorough analysis of the threat of a magnetic pulse on the nation’s electrical grid and it pointed out that even though we view the nation’s electrical distribution system as a single “grid” it’s actually a collection of regional grids which have some significant ways to avoid a system-wide shutdown.

There have been several worldwide electro-magnetic “events” that have happened since the electrical power grid was established. The most severe of which was the one which caused an east coast power outage of several hours. That one was due to a direct hit on the earth from one of the most powerful solar magnetic storms recorded. And yet the “firewalls” (for lack of a better term) managed to keep the outage to two regional distribution systems.

However, even a regional outage is a serious problem.

Perhaps of more concern is what such an event would mean to our satellites, but that’s probably something for another post. And again, there are some things that satellite owners/controllers can do to mitigate the impact (such as shut down critical components temporarily).

The reason there is so much concern about a worldwide electro-magnetic pulse event is because if we don’t shut down the key transformers which handle the vast bulk of the load of power distribution in time, a sufficiently powerful event could cause them to essentially melt into goo. Furthermore, much of our infrastructure is now run by computers (including such things as water distribution, sewer control, natural gas distribution, electricity, traffic lights, airport traffic control, etc…) and a sufficiently powerful event could theoretically melt the circuits in your iPod, along with billions of other modern electronic devices. Such an event would have to be unprecedented, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. There was an electro-magnetic event back in the 19th century, when we were just beginning to build our grid, which was so powerful that telegraph operators were able to send telegraphs without connecting to their batteries. All sorts of atmospheric effects were observed and some electrical devices (like light bulbs in some houses) picked up enough current from the event that they actually turned themselves on. Such an event today would have completely inpredictable results. As with many things there are those who tend towards the most sensational and catastrophic theories, and those who don’t. Reporters, as a general rule, are looking for the sensational, and so that’s what they print.

The bottom line, as I understand it, is that the sun can generate a magnetic storm at any time, it’s just more likely to do it during a solar maximum where there are a lot of sunspots. Since the conventional wisdom in the solar physics community for the past few years has been that we’ll see a major escalation of sunspot activity, that leads to predictions of more and larger solar magnetic events, which leads to more concern over one that happens to end up coming directly towards the earth.

The sun has not been cooperating with this “conventional wisdom” for the past year or two. And much like the hurricane forecasters, it seems that every year that hurricanes are less severe and less frequent, the doomsayers respond by simply ratcheting up their catastrophic projections for the next year. I’m already seeing that for this year’s hurricane season which is predicted to be huge. Just like every year has been predicted to be huge ever since Katrina, and yet we have seen a major decline in hurricane activity since then.

I’ve pretty much learned to take everything I read in the “news” with a grain of salt, and in particular I find myself suspicious of anything that is reported from a “scientist.” Science has in some ways been so permeated and poisoned by political activism and journalistic incompetence or malfeasance that I work hard to read between the lines on everything I read or hear with the word “science” in it.